The previous article argued that ranking well in Google is no longer the whole job, because a growing share of buyers now ask an assistant instead. The obvious next question is where you currently stand — and unlike most marketing questions, this one has a free answer you can get this afternoon.
Here is how to run it properly, because there is one mistake that makes the whole exercise useless.
Do not search your own name
This is the mistake. Almost everyone opens ChatGPT and types the name of their business, reads the description, and forms a view.
That tells you very little. A buyer who already knows your name is not the buyer at risk — they were always going to find you. The buyer you are losing is the one who does not know you exist, and who asks a question with no business name in it at all.
So ask what they would ask:
- "Who should I use for a home extension in Brisbane?"
- "Best commercial electricians in Brisbane northside"
- "I need a website for my building company — who does that in Brisbane?"
- "How much does a custom website cost in Australia?"
Write five or six of these before you open anything, phrased the way a customer would phrase them rather than the way you would. Include at least one that is a question about the problem rather than the service, because that is how a lot of people actually start.
Then, separately and last, search your business name — not to judge visibility, but to check accuracy.
Ask more than one assistant
Run the same list through ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. They retrieve from different places and they disagree more than people expect: it is entirely normal to be named by one and invisible to another.
Copilot is worth including specifically because it runs on Bing outright, and ChatGPT's search retrieval also goes through Bing's index. If you appear in Copilot but not in Gemini, that is a different diagnosis from appearing in neither.
Write down four things
A screenshot is not an audit. For each question, record four columns:
- Which businesses were named. Usually one to three. Note whether they are your actual competitors or aggregators and directories, because "the answer was three directory sites" is a different problem from "the answer was three competitors".
- What it said about you, if anything.
- Whether that was accurate. Services, service area, and anything about price are the three that are most often wrong.
- Which sources it cited. This is the column people skip and it is the most useful one — it tells you exactly what the assistant is reading, which is what you have to change.
Reading the result
You will get one of three outcomes, and they are not the same problem.
You were named and described accurately. Good, and rarer than you would think. The work here is protecting it: keep the details consistent everywhere they appear, and re-check on a schedule.
You were named but described wrongly. A content and consistency problem. Look at the sources it cited — it is almost always repeating something that is genuinely published somewhere, just out of date or inconsistent with your site. Fix it at the source rather than trying to argue with the model.
You were not mentioned at all. This is the most common result, and it is usually not a judgement about your business. It is that the assistant could not find anything about you it could use. That is an indexing and retrievability problem, and it is a more fixable one than it sounds.
"Nothing came back" is usually a Bing problem
Here is the part that surprises people. Because ChatGPT's search runs through Bing's index, a page Bing has never crawled is a page ChatGPT cannot cite — no matter how well written it is, and no matter how well it ranks in Google.
Plenty of businesses are thoroughly indexed by Google and barely known to Bing, because nobody has ever thought about it. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes about ten minutes, and lets you submit your sitemap directly. It is the least glamorous item on this list and frequently the one that changes the result.
The related finding from published research: of the pages assistants cite, only a small minority also rank in the top ten of Google for the same query. Citation is not a reward for ranking. It is a separate contest, which is the good news if you are not winning the first one.
What to fix first
In rough order of return:
- Make sure you are actually indexed — Bing first, since it is the one almost nobody has checked.
- Make your business details identical everywhere they appear. Same name, same service area, same description. Assistants cross-check, and inconsistency reads as uncertainty.
- Answer the question at the top of the page. Assistants lift passages that stand on their own. A paragraph that only makes sense after the two above it cannot be quoted.
- Publish specifics, especially about price. A number can be quoted back. "Competitive rates" cannot, and most of your competitors are still hiding behind a contact form.
- Re-run this audit in three months and compare.
None of this is expensive. Most of it is a morning's work and a decision to stop being vague in public. The businesses that will be named a year from now are mostly the ones that started checking.